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Sunday, 8 March 2015

Jealousy - Human and Divine

I want to think with you
about jealousy. Can there be anyone reading this who hasn’t felt it? Anyone who
hasn’t experienced the pain of feeling excluded, feeling that others have got
something going on between them that you aren’t part of? That someone else is
preferred, rather than you? ‘Jealousy in the heart makes one’s bones rot’
(Proverbs 14: 30) – jealousy is corrosive, once it gets inside you it’s hard to
get rid of it.

Shakespeare, famously,
created awhole play around it: Othello.
And a character, Iago, who sets up Othello to feel jealousy in relation to his
wife Desdemona - and then (and we are
appalled and fascinated by the cynicism and irony of it) has the chutzpah to warn the Moor: ‘Oh beware my lord, of jealousy. It is the
green-eyed monster that doth mock the meat it feeds on’ : i.e. jealousy is a
monster that makes vicious sport with the victims it devours...Of course it is
Iago, as well as jealousy itself, that is such a monster.

And we see Othello tearing
himself apart with jealousy, creating such murderous feelings in him that he
ends up killing the woman he loves. It’sa terrifying play, but one that we are drawn to and relate to because
jealousy is a universal emotion, one we all can recognise has been at some
stage roused in us, even if it isn’t a constant companion (though it might be).

Jealousy of course often
comes up in couples, between partners about other relationships – jealousy is
always about triangles. But it can be between siblings over who is a parent’s favourite,
real or imagined. The Torah is full of those kind of stories of sibling jealousy,
Genesis in particular. And feelings like this can last a lifetime.

Or jealousy can be between
friends - who is closer to who. In all
sets of relationships jealousy is waiting , green-eyed monster that it is, to rear
its ugly head. We so much want to be special, to be chosen, to be the one and
only one – for someone, for anyone – it’s a desire of the heart from our
earliest months and years, and the frustrations around this basic human
instinct are always available to be stirred up in us, to ‘make our bones rot’ –
to make us feel rotten, as we might say.

We are just built that way,
it seems – some people feel it stronger than others, some people are more
haunted by it than others, but for some it can feel unshakeable, well nigh unbearable, once we are in the grip of it. Because it is
omnipresent in our natures, you can feel – should feel – very blessed if that
monster is only a rare visitor to your heart and soul.

The fantasy of not having competitors
for our love interest’s affections - a mother’s love, or a father’s love, or a
partner’s love – is very powerful. We might profoundly wish that jealousy could
be exorcised from our emotional lives – but ‘dream on’, as they say, because
jealousy is here to stay, it’s part of our humanity. And it’s so powerful a
psychic reality that – and this might surprise us – God also feels it, it
seems. According to the Torah it is fully present as a divine reality as well
as a human one.

But what on earth – or in
heaven – does that mean? what are our Biblical storytellers getting at when
they describe even God, the Holy One of Israel, as being consumed by this
bone-rotting, dementing emotion?Not
just consumed by it but, as we read in our Torah portion today (Exodus 34),
defined by this emotion of jealousy. It couldn’t be stated more clearly: ‘Don’t
worship another god’, says the Holy One, ‘ki
Adonai kana sh’mo, for the eternal One, his essence, his name, is Jealousy’
– and then as if you haven’t got the point already, it repeats it: ‘he is a
jealous God’ - el kana hu (Exodus 34:14).

This isn’t the first time we find
God’s jealousy spoken about in the Torah. It’s there at the very beginning of
the Ten Commandments. God gets straight
down to business: ‘I am the God who brought you out of the land of Egypt – you
shall have no other gods but me, you shouldn’t make any graven images of them...’
And He goes on about this at some length – no images, no likenesses, nothing
should remind you that I, Adonai, am in competition for your affection. It’s all
slightly obsessive, as if there’s some kind of insecurity in God that keeps bursting through: ‘...don’t
worship other gods, or serve them, for...’ – and then it’s said straight out, ki anochi Adonai Eloheycha el kana’ (Exodus
20:5): ‘...for I the Eternal your God am
a jealous God’. This scene is set at Sinai, where God reveals Himself – but
perhaps reveals more about Himself than He is consciously aware of, so to
speak. (Does God have an unconscious?).

So by the time we get to our
sedrah, we shouldn’t be that surprised to hear this repeated - about God’s
jealous nature – though here it’s spelled out even more starkly. This jealousy
is part of his very essence. So what are we to make of this? We rabbis in our
sermons usually prefer to talk about those other qualities, earlier in the
chapter: the God of compassion and lovingkindness, long-sufferingand merciful – Adonai, Adonai, el rachum v’chanun...(34: 6-7),all those emotions which we are encouraged to find within ourselves
and live out from within ourselves, all those divine qualities that reside
within the human heart.

But jealousy – what are we supposed
to do with that divine quality? Can jealousy ever be benign? Something to
cultivate in ourselves, like those other qualities? Bible translators are
sometimes uncomfortable with this theme of jealousy: the one we use in our
synagogue fudges it: ‘...you must not worship any other god, because the Lord (Adonai), whose name is Impassioned, is
an impassioned God.’ (Etz Hayim p.542).

It’s true that kana can mean ‘zealous, ardent,
passionately involved’ – but it’s main meaning is jealousy, the kind of
jealousy that attaches itself to sexual possessiveness. And you can see that association
in the text when three times in the next verses the narrators introduce the
image of ‘whoring’: it’s a nakedly provocative image, metaphor. ‘You have a
covenant- brit - with Me, Adonai’,
the text says (34:10), so when you enter your promised land you have to destroy
all the altars and pillars and reminders of other gods and goddesses -
otherwise you will form a relationship, a covenant – brit – with them, and whore after their gods (v.15); and it spells
out the process whereby Israel’s God will be betrayed: your men will lust after
the women of the land of Canaan who will be ‘whoring’ after the deities they
know, who will make you Israelite men ‘whore’ after those local, pagan deities.
(The casual misogyny of the text - the power of women to lead men astray –
we just note in passing).

But this text shows what it means
to have a jealous God: possessive, insecure, anxious that in His invisibility
and His essentially enigmatic nature, He just isn’t going to have the presence,
the reality, the attractiveness of all these other competing deities for His
people’s affections. “You must have eyes only for Me. You must have ears only
for Me. You must have hearts dedicated only to Me” – this is the lonely,
demanding Voice we hear in this text. “I have chosen you. Now you have to choose
Me, be faithful only to Me”. The God of Israel implicitly presents Himself –
the narrators present Him – as if God were Israel’s husband and lover :
it’sa metaphor picked up and made
explicit by both Hosea and Jeremiah later in the tradition.

The more you think about it,
the more painful this relationship seems. This green-eyed monster within God
torturing him with images and fantasies of betrayal. But I suppose we need to
ask: is it only fantasies, imaginings, as it was with Othello? Or is God’s
jealousy necessary? Is it understandable? Is it congruent with what goes on in
the psyche of the people of Israel? Does the construction of and worship of the
Golden Calf while Moses is away from the people on Sinai suggest that the Holy
One of Israel has good cause to feel that He isn’t that special in the eyes of
His people? That they have other gods they have their eyes on, other sources of
authority they’d rather dedicate themselves to, prostrate themselves in front
of? What other gods might the Israelite people prefer to follow, the Jewish
people prefer to listen to, than their difficult, demanding, elusive God?

We know the idols we follow
very well. We might not think of them as idols, but they are the modern
equivalents of those old gods with their altars and pillars and sacred groves:
what do we value, where do we put our faith, our belief? We’ll each have our
own anthology of idols, and causes where idolatry is in play: we believe that
money will make us feel secure, or the stock market, or a political party, or
nationalism, or the State of Israel; we believe that science or technology will
sort out the environment; that more CCTV cameras will make us safer, or more
GCHQ hoovering up of communications data will protect us; that better laws on
health and safety will help us to lead happier lives; that nuclear weapons make
us able to sleep safely at night; we believe in inevitable social progress, or put
our faith in medical advances, or ethnic identity, or the civilising value of
the arts, or the practiceof religious
traditions – so many gods we put our faith in, though we never think of them as
gods, they seem real and here and this-wordly.

Whatever mix we construct for
ourselves, we each have our pantheon that is in competition with Adonai – The One Who was, is, will be:
the animating spirit of the universe. No wonder Adonaiis so jealous: His
people are always chasing after security and meaning in one place or another -
the names of the gods and idols change but the process is as old as the hills.

For those who attend to the
Torah’s challenging message, we hear how the Jewish people are bound into a
covenant with a demanding, peripatetic, unseen divine Presence who won’t let
them go, but who then has to suffer dementing levels of frustration, jealousy,
at His beloved people’s inability to stay focused on that special relationship.
We are so easily seduced, the other gods are so present, so attractive, they
make emotional and rational and psychological claims on us. How can we resist? We can’t resist – they have colonised our
minds, our thinking, our believing. Who has the energy, the will-power, to say
no to the easy truths and easy lies-masquerading-as-truths that we are daily
bombarded with?

There are many, many wondrous
and beautiful and uplifting and life-enhancing things in our world, that we can
enjoy, that we can nurture, that we can help create – the godly is around us
and within us. But we have to sort out which of the aspects of our world are
godly, are fragments of Adonai
incarnated in our world – and which aspects of our world are the old idols and
other gods in new names and in new disguises. Does it matter whether we can do
this work, be engaged in this never-ending spiritual and psychological work, of
sorting out which is which? We intuit
that it does matter, somehow, to the well-being of our own lives to be involved
in this spiritual journey; and, as our
Torah, shows, it seems too to matter to God, the Holy One of Israel, that we
keep Him in mind.

God needs to feel special,
just like we need to feel special. So maybe our spiritual work is to give Him a
bit more attention; the Torah’s promise is that it will probably do us good to
do that; and it will do God good too, as it were, so that his jealousy doesn’t
end up destroying the ones he loves - out of a mistaken Othello-like belief
that we are no longer faithful.

[based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue,
March 7th 2015]